Voice in the Night
By Carin Klabbers

When I was
nineteen-years-old, my friend Hanneke Boogaard was studying to become a nurse at
Beatrix Hospital in The Netherlands. There, nursing students work during their
study, the same as regular personnel. During her work on the night shift,
Hanneke was strangely drawn to one patient in particular, a forty-year-old woman
in a coma. Because Mrs. Groensma never had visitors, Hanneke remained at her
bedside longer than the others. At first she tried not to admit it, since for
her all patients should mean the same. But this woman fascinated her.

When
Hanneke heard the patient had no living relatives, she spent even more time with
her.She’d learned that people in
comas could sometimes hear when they were spoken to. This woman had no one to do
that for her, so Hanneke talked softly to her every night. Since she didn’t
know her, she didn’t know what to talk about, so she told Mrs. Groensma all
about herself. She explained how her parents had died in a car crash when she
was young.For hours she shared her
many memories of them. That’s all she had to cling to now. How she wished she
had a specific personal item to remember them by — the golden four-leaf clover
locket her mother always wore. It was lost during the accident and never found,
even though relatives searched the crash site and nearby ditch. Night after
night, she talked and talked and grew more and more attached to Mrs. Groensma.

She would likely never
come out of the coma, and she had no one in the world to care for her.
Therefore, the time came for her to be transferred to a nursing home where she
would eventually die. When Hanneke objected, she was heavily reprimanded for
losing touch with her professional attitude and forbidden to contact the patient
in the nursing home. Hanneke saw the logic of her supervisors but could not help
thinking about Mrs. Groensma often.

Time went by and Hanneke
became a nurse and found a job in the Beatrix hospital. One day at work she was
instructing a patient when a lady, who was questioning another nurse, turned and
deliberately walked towards her. It was Mrs. Groensma! They found an empty room
where they could speak privately and Mrs. Groensma explained what she was doing
there.

She recalled having been
in a dark and lonely place, all alone, until the voice of what she thought must
have been an angel started speaking, drawing her attention. Later when that
voice stopped talking to her, she longed for the sound so much that she started
struggling to get to the place where the voice had come from. She came out of
coma and took a long time to recover. Meanwhile she had questioned the nursing
home staff. They eventually told her they had instructions to keep away a
certain nurse who had made the mistake of getting too attached to her.

As soon as Mrs. Groensma
was able, she came to the hospital to find that nurse. When she heard Hanneke
talk to the patient, she recognized the voice that had spoken to her during her
coma.

Mrs. Groensma took
Hanneke’s hand. “I have something I want to give you to thank you. I found
it fifteen years ago in a ditch and originally wanted to put pictures of my late
husband and me in it and give it to my daughter. When she died I was all alone
and wanted to throw it away, but I never came to it. I now want you to have
it.”

Mrs. Groensma handed
Hanneke a small box. Inside, sparkling in the sunlight, lay a golden four-leaf
clover locket. With a pounding heart Hanneke opened it to see her parents’
photos.

Hanneke now wears the
locket day and night and visits Mrs. Groensma whenever she wants.And they talk and talk and grow more and more attached.